Imperial Garden Seafood Restaurant
18230 E Valley Hwy, Suite 116, Kent, 425-656-0999
Mon-Thurs 10:30 am-3 pm, 5-10 pm; Fri-Sun 10 am-3 pm, 5-10 pm.
It’s kind of a funny thing to go from IKEA, the world’s most highly manipulative store, to a form of eating that also takes you away from your normal sense of consumer prerogative: the menu. But there, as my mother, my husband, and I stood in an endless Swedish checkout line (I didn’t know I needed cocktail napkins, and yet I now own several packets, along with a dish brush shaped like a whale and a gold lamé wine cooler that seemed like a good idea at the time), was a sign urging us to continue our international shopping experience at the Great Wall Mall down the street. I am nothing if not suggestible, and, feeling a little queasy from the smell of the IKEA hot dogs warming up nearby, I suggested dim sum for lunch.
I get excited about dim sum, but I’m not convinced it’s the most satisfying way to eat. You enter the restaurant hungry (in this case, beset by the kind of hunger that can only be brought on by IKEA and certain very large museums–there must be some connection between concentrated looking and the alimentary canal), and more often than not, if you are there at a proper dim sum hour you wait for a table. It’s not a long wait, as turnover is high at a restaurant with hundreds of seats, but it can be agonizing to stand by as you see the steamy food carts roll by.
As soon as you sit down, then, there is the urge to say yes to everything and consequently ruin your appetite for the intriguing offerings that invariably arrive after you are already stuffed. The waitresses, in their brocade vests and neck ribbons, sense your desperation, and up the ante with multiple offerings from the same cart. Dumplings? Yes! How about a barbecued pork humbao ($2.20)? As a friend has wisely pointed out, at that point in the meal, you say yes to everything but the feet (duck in our case). Boring old stir-fried noodles with bean sprouts ($4.99) that I’m a little allergic to? Why not? Two kinds of shrimp dumplings ($2.75), shrimp egg roll ($2.75), and shrimp rice noodle rolls ($3.25), too? Bring it on! (As usual, I loved the slick rice noodles, but Mom was grossed out by their slipperiness; apparently some tastes aren’t hereditary.) We experienced a definite pro-shrimp bias at Imperial Garden– pleasant enough but a little monotonous. The Garden tends to be sparing with the extras, not a lot of greenery to distract from the essential shrimpness. Nevertheless, my favorite dumpling came open-topped with a roe-engorged shrimpette peeking out of the wrapper.
By the time the more offbeat dishes appeared, we were already slowing down. Out came the steaming sticky rice in banana leaves ($3.25)–made yummy with porky bits and a little more fat than seemly. Then came taro dumplings ($2.75) bristling with deep-fried bits of starchy fluff. Stuffed with curried vegetables, they were tasty–if heavy–Chinese samosas.
By then, the cart rollers could tell we amateurs were getting full: They stopped paying attention to us. I’d been looking forward to some gai lan (Chinese broccoli), but the special entrée waiter who was carrying it breezed right by us. I had to hail the turnip-cake cart like a taxi. I was eager to show my mom, who grew up in the South, what the Chinese can do with down-home ingredients like turnips and ham, in this case ($2.20) cooked to a sweet mash and fried up to a crisp. My mother liked them (she was reminded of scrapple), “But,” she said, “I don’t think I ever ate a cooked turnip in my childhood.” Her family ate them raw–she and her brother even stole them from other farmers’ fields when they found themselves far away from home on a bike ride.
As usual, the meal came to about $9 per person before tip, somehow the magical tally for almost every dim sum meal I’ve eaten. I was happy with my meal, but bitter about being passed over by the broccoli, and stubbornly convinced that one of those little bamboo steamers I waved away contained the holy grail of dumplings. If I had just paced myself better it could have all been mine.